What Film Noir Reader will quickly reveal is the breadth of theories which critics have brought to the noir phenomenon. Whatever one calls it–series, style, genre, movement, school, cycle–none of the seminal essayists on film noir represented in this book have contradicted Borde and Chaumeton’s remark that the existence of a noir series is “obvious.” Certainly they did not all agree (when have critics ever done that?), but they did address the visual techniques and narrative structures of film noir in dozens of articles.
History is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, although there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.
War and Peace
It should go without saying that any investigator must first look at the heart of the matter, to the films themselves. How then could Marc Vernet look at those films and conclude that “film noir is a collector’s idea that for the moment can only be found in books”? Actually, this may be the most accurate statement that Vernet makes; although, borrowing a touch of his condescension, he probably doesn’t even know why. Obviously there is nowhere in the literal history of cinema, that is, in the films themselves, a “film noir,” any more than there is a Western, a war film, or a screwball comedy. Even straining credibility and accepting Bordwell’s assertion that the makers of noir films did not in any way realize what they were doing, is conscious intentionality a prerequisite for creative expression? It can only be assumed that it is Vernet’s lack of knowledge about the real process by which films are made which leads to his confusion. Of course, it does not take a rocket scientist to realize that one is hard pressed to make a samurai film without swords or a Western without horses.
Fresh from the translation of Borde and Chaumeton, I am moved to slip for a moment into a free-form, anecdotal, somewhat French style. In 1975, I sit in an almost empty theater in Santa Monica watching Walter Hill’s Hard Times, the directorial debut of the screenwriter of the remarkable neo-noir Hickey and Boggs; and I am somehow reminded of Kihachi Okamoto’s Samurai Assassin. Two years later, I sit in a living room in the Hollywood hills, interviewing Walter Hill for Movie magazine. In the preliminary banter, I remark that the Charles Bronson character in Hard Times is like a Japanese ronin, a masterless samurai. Hill goes to a shelf and brings over two scripts. One is a Western, still unproduced, entitled The Last Gun. While I flip through, noting that the main character is named Ronin and that the act breaks are marked by quotes from bushido, the code of the warrior, Hill finds a particular page in the Hard Times script. As he hands it to me, his thumb indicates a line of stage direction in which the street fighter “crouches in the corner like a samurai.”
Is Hard Times a samurai film? Of course not. No more than the elements borrowed even more extensively in Hill’s The Warriors can make it a samurai film. Neither Hill nor Clint Eastwood nor John Milius nor George Miller, as much as they might admire the genre, have made anything more than allusions to samurai films; just as reciprocally Akira Kurosawa could never make a John Ford Western. Styles of films have more than requisite icons to identify them. Filmmakers know this when the films are made. Contemporary filmmakers understand, as actor Nick Nolte asserts, that “film noir is putting a style over the story.”5_ “Collectors,” as Vernet brands them, only realize it after the fact. In the end, does it matter what the filmmakers of the classic period of film noir thought about the films they were making? Film noir is a closed system. To some extent, it is defined after the fact. How could it be otherwise? Was the Hundred Years War, something else after only fifty years of fighting? So when did film noir become what it is? For those more interested in the phenomenon than the phenomenology, the answer must be from the first, when that first noir film opened at the Bijou. But perhaps a more eloquent answer is a question. Consider the photograph reproduced at right. Why did Robert Aldrich, producer/director of Kiss Me Deadly, pose with a copy of the first edition Borde and Chaumeton’s book (in which he is not even mentioned) as he stood on the set of Attack! in 1956?
2.
A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be.
Moby Dick
Questions of phenomenology aside, film history is as clear now about film noir as ever: it finds its existence as obvious as Borde and Chaumeton did forty years ago. If observers of film noir agree on anything, it is on the boundaries of the classic period, which begins in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon and ends less than a score of years later with Touch of Evil. Issues of pre-noir or neo-noir aside, the editors of this book and many other commentators have long considered film noir to be more than either a genre or a movement. Exactly what Borde and Chaumeton claim to mean by their term “series,” which they define as a group of “motion pictures from one country sharing certain traits (style, atmosphere, subject matter…) strongly enough to mark them unequivocally and to give them, over time, an unmistakable character,” is not clarified by their lists of analogies to film noir, which include both genres and movements. Because so many of the essayists on the noir phenomenon in the 70s were still deliberating the question of “essential traits” posed by Borde and Chaumeton in 1955, there is no consensus on film noir to be found in this book.
Beginning with Borde and Chaumeton’s first chapter, “Towards a Definition of Film Noir,” Part One of Film Noir Reader contains eight Seminal Essays. Taken together they represent the proliferation and divergence of significant published opinions on film noir through 1979. It was in 1979 that the first edition of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference appeared; and since then, as already noted, eleven other book-length compendiums and anthologies in English have followed.
It was in the 1983 Afterword to the reprint of Panorama du Film Noir Am?ricain, which was based on an article about film noir in the 70s, that Borde and Chaumeton asserted that “film noir had fulfilled its role, which was to create a specific malaise and to drive home a social criticism of the United States.” Whether the authors were injecting the issue of “social criticism” in hindsight is unknown; but it underlines the second main theme which many of the seminal essayists also consider: the relationship of the noir cycle to the socio-cultural history of the United States.
As Borde and Chaumeton wrestle through lists of films, considering plot points and character types, they also make a telling observation about the style of film noir. In their subsequent chapter on the “sources” of film noir, they introduce not only the obvious influence of hard-boiled fiction but also the prevalence of psychoanalysis in the 1940s as a popular treatment of nervous disorders. The original edition of Panorama du Film Noir Am?ricain had a unique perspective being not merely the first but also the only study of film noir written contemporaneously with the classic period. From this position, Borde and Chaumeton’s initial attempt at definition of film noir cannot be superseded as the benchmark for all subsequent work making the same attempt.
By 1962, French film historian George Sadoul was offhandedly remarking in his Histoire du Cin?ma that film noir “was a school,… where psychoanalysis was applied [so that] a childhood trauma became the cause of criminal behavior just as unemployment explained social unrest.” Both the term and the concept took longer to gain acceptance with English-language critics. The first extensive discussion of film noir in English appeared in the chapter, “Black Cinema,” of Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg’s Hollywood in the Forties. Beginning with an evocative and oft-cited paragraph about the dark wet streets and flashing neon signs that create the “ambience of film noir,” what follows is an overview of what Higham and Greenberg consider “a genre,” but no usable definition of film noir emerges from this impressionistic piece.
In 1970, an article by Raymond Durgnat appeared in the British magazine Cinema. “Paint It Black: the Family Tree of the Film Noir” is the first structural approach to film noir which asserts that “it is not a genre as the Western or gangster film is, and takes us into the realms of classification by motif and tone.” As Durgnat rambles through scores of titles in less than a dozen pages the branches of his family tree twist around and entangle themselves with each other. In the end Durgnat has no time, and perhaps no inclination, to plot these intertwinings. Ironically, Durgnat’s “family tree” is better known in a truncated version stripped down to a two-page chart of just categories printed by Film Comment in 1974. Curiously, Vernet claims that Durgnat’s self-professed “imperfect schematizations” helped “to paralyse reflection on film noir.”
Paul Schrader’s “notes on film noir” originally appeared in a program accompanying a retrospective of noir films at the first Los Angeles Film Exposition. When it was published in Film Comment in 1972, it was the first analysis of film noir for many American readers. If any single essay had the possibility of “paralyzing reflection on film noir,” it was this one. Schrader cited and embraced Durgnat’s assertion that film noir is not a genre. Rather than charting his own types, Schrader summarizes the mediating influences on the noir phenomenon and then discusses its style and themes. Schrader steps over the question of definition with a disclaimer about subjectivity: “Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir, and a personal list of film titles…. How many noir elements does it take to make a film noir noir?” While he is the first to summarize succinctly four “causes”–(1) World War II and post-War disillusionment; (2) post-War realism; (3) the German influence; and (4) the hard-boiled tradition–Schrader considers the “uneasy, exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism” to be contradictory; and, surprisingly, he never considers how oneirism or nightmarish images can reflect a psychological truth as mentioned by Borde and Chaumeton.
The ground-breaking aspect of Schrader’s article is the outline of film noir style and characterization. For Schrader the classic period ends early but still produces a plethora of chiaroscuro and an multitude of haunted protagonists. The stylistic discussion carries over as the piece ends tellingly on the question of film noir and auteurism: “Auteur criticism is interested in how directors are different; film noir criticism is interested in what they have in common.”
In early 1974 Film Comment published another article as influential as and perhaps even more widely cited than the Durgnat and Schrader pieces: Janey Place and Lowell Peterson’s “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir.” “Visual Motifs” is actually two separate pieces. In the first part, Place and Peterson introduce the concept of what they call “anti-traditional elements,” that is, a mise-en-scene by directors and a lighting scheme by cinematographers that radically diverges from the studio “norm.” In doing so, they are the first to attempt a